Moving to F2P would certainly explain why everythings so quiet on the dev posts of the official forums atm.

And i'm sure there must be a quarterly financial report due soon, given that i have seen that there are rewards coming if you have a sub live at the end of the month and the "news" that the HK companion is coming even though it gives no details about it. They are trying to keep as many people subbed for one more quarterly review i think.

Moving to F2P would certainly explain why everythings so quiet on the dev posts of the official forums atm.

And i'm sure there must be a quarterly financial report due soon, given that i have seen that there are rewards coming if you have a sub live at the end of the month and the "news" that the HK companion is coming even though it gives no details about it. They are trying to keep as many people subbed for one more quarterly review i think.

Firstly, nothing suprises me about what Bioware will do to pad their quarterly reports now.I am expecting resub emails for free weeks, bribes, gifts, free play time, anything to make the numbers look higher than they are.

This is what I think of when EA has their quarterly investor call:

Also, blaming the players for SWTOR is completely off the page.

_________________

Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. Winston Churchill

I am expecting resub emails for free weeks, bribes, gifts, free play time, anything to make the numbers look higher than they are.

Yup

Quote:

In appreciation for the community’s support of the Free Character Transfer service, we are giving all characters on qualifying servers (including all destination servers) an in-game pet, the Gannifari, and 25 Black Hole Commendations to help purchase high level gear.

This is as long as you have an active sub at the end of this month

Quote:

http://www.swtor.com/info/media/trailers/hk-51-revealed

"official" reveal of HK companion but with no date, gameplay info or any information of interest. it's just a carrott.

Quote:

As part of today’s maintenance and update two new additions came to Star Wars: The Old Republic. The first is the long heralded permanent Free Trial last mentioned in June at E3. Similar to previous free weekends, players can now experience the Origin and Capitol worlds of both factions, and even take part in the first Flashpoint for both sides. Players who take part in the trial will no longer have to worry about a hard time limit to their fun.

In addition, the first reward for referring players to the game has arrived in the form of the Kurtob Alliance speeder. This mount, usable at level 25 but with the speed of an endgame speeder, is awarded when a single referral purchases a subscription, or applies a time code.

Free trial and unique speeder for folks referring friends to the game

and yeah, there is some kind of free game time at the moment for folks with a lapsed sub. All this within a month comes off as really desperate.

Nail It then Scale It: The Entrepreneur's Guide to Creating and Managing Breakthrough Innovation wrote:

All too often, entrepreneurs fall in love with their product or technology, they ignore negative feedback from customers, and they spend years building a product based on a vision that no one else shares...

I think this is the failing in a suprising amount of MMOs. From Vanguard to 38 Studios to SWTOR.The devs fall so in love with their vision for the game that they dont take on any negative feedback. The negative feedback they get is written off as uninformed, trolling etc.They actually believe in their game so much that they cant see any negative aspects of it.There was plenty of criticism of SWTOR in beta, not least from me, on their official forums. But nothing was acted on. I doubt they ever seriously considered any of the negative feedback.

The current SWTOR playtime is roughly double that of Eve as reported by xfire.So 600K accounts would be my wild guess for SWTOR right now (it is a wild, but at least partially educated guess). TSW will probably have hit them hard. GW2 will hit them even harder.

"New ways to play" in this context undoubtedly means free to play.They probably know internally that when GW2 is released they will lose a lot of subs, if they dont change their revenue stream.

_________________

Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. Winston Churchill

Not sure if free to play is really the way to go at the moment, even at 600k subs it's still more subs then any other MMO except WoW. There is no doubt that it will eventually go free to play, but that will take another investment (the game wasn't build for it) and it's still about 10 million in cash coming in every month. Because of their investment it's not enough but it's still a significant amount of money and I doubt going free to play will give them more each month. They are only going free to play if they think it will bring in more money, I don't think they have reached that point yet. It's a last resort that they will prepare for but I don't see it happening very soon, in the mean time they are cutting costs where they can.

Looks like GW2 is more popular then I thought, 1/3rd of WoW for a limited access beta weekend, not bad.

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